Thursday, July 31 A little this, some that

Post 1246, Day 212 of 2014
- 1,308 days since I started this blog -

Daily Comment

It's been a long time since I was so busy I accidentally double-booked a gig. It isn't a mistake I could make on my own, though. I needed help from Bradshaw Blues' leader and booker to help, by only putting it one place online, and not telling me about it.

But it happened. It'll be okay, the BB gig I just found out about is a weird one, and it has been played solo by Chad in the past, which is what he'll do. He'll actually make decent money for a night, and I'll be somewhere else playing with some new folks. Win-win.

Speaking of someone making decent money, it wasn't me today: My investment account took the biggest one-day hit in its just-under four-year history today, after a pretty big hit yesterday.

The internet makes it easy to over-track this, but I treat it like my weight. Which is to say, with some diligence but not much emotional investment.

No matter, it's only a day, and, given my 2%-a-year benchmark, I have still profited well beyond my expectations (an average of almost 15% per year, annualized). Pretty good. Pretty lucky.

Saving the way I have is one of my proudest achievements, since it is representative of the turn-around I've had since leaving North Carolina.

Apropos of nothing, Alex changed his Facebook status to 'In a Relationship'. Best of luck.

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 Food and Diet Section

2014 Daily Weight

Today's Weight:          212.0 lbs

Previous Weight:         211.2 lbs

Day Net Loss/Gain:       + 0.8 lbs
       
Diet Comment

Things were going so well until I spotted that cookie after dinner. That set off my hunger, and the late-night snack of celery and mayonnaise was too much.

Food Log 

Breakfast
Skipped.

Lunch

A cocoa-hemp-kale protein shake (almond-coconut milk, kefir, kale, large organic egg, whey powder (24g protein), hemp seeds, hemp protein (7g protein), raw organic cacao powder, chia gel, moringa leaf powder, cinnamon and stevia-inulin blend.

Snack

Pepperoni.

Dinner

Bacon cheeseburger and guacamole. Not shown: Salad with baby kale, baby spinach, chard, black beans, cole slaw mix and balsamic vinaigrette.

Snack

Pepperoni.

Liquid Intake

   Coffee:  0 oz.   Water: 128+ oz.

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Wednesday, July 30 Present-ing the past, future

Post 1245, Day 211 of 2014
- 1,307 days since I started this blog -

Daily Comment

I am done with all this backward-looking. For now, anyway.

It doesn't help. It isn't a question of not learning from history, it is a matter of the history, as it is recalled, being grossly inaccurate.

Humans are a self-deluding species. I have to accept that I am, as well.
And, looking forward has approximately the same helpfulness as looking back (none, in case you started reading at this paragraph).

Making plans? Well, its fun, but it has the effect of distracting you from the present with fiction - fiction because nobody knows what is coming. Being distracted from the present is, of course, how I spend a lot of the present time.

Cause and effect makes no sense if time isn't the linear thing that we, as humans, see it in the sense-perceptual world. We don't know the effect of anything we do or say, or what percentage of our actions will cause a given future effect. 

When you start with the effect and look back at the cause, you usually find yourself with not one, but an incalculable number of them, many having a coincidental or unlikely  relationship that had to take place to create that effect. Then you fall down the rabbit hole of looking for the cause of those causes, and then you end up taking drugs and abandoning linear time altogether.

So, it's easier to look at effect and causes from the effect point of view (in fact, it's the only way), working back from the effect to its causes in the past. Easier, but not easy. 

And, like I said, looking at the past is something I'm going to try to avoid doing for a while.

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 Food and Diet Section

2014 Daily Weight

Today's Weight:          211.2 lbs

Previous Weight:         210.6 lbs

Day Net Loss/Gain:       + 0.6 lbs
       
Diet Comment

Late night eating, with carbs. Today, all restaurant food. SMH.

Food Log 

Breakfast
Skipped.

Lunch
At Ling-Ling's Chinese Buffet and Grill:

Brussels sprouts, kimchee, and, from the "Mongolian Grill", my go-to dish: pork and chicken with cabbage, onions, mushrooms, green peppers and broccoli.

Snack

Pepperoni and a small salad of baby kale, baby spinach, chard, cole slaw mix and creamy balsamic dressing.

Dinner

At Eskapes:

Grilled Ahi tuna steak with bacon on a mixed salad. and a glass of Pinot Noir Not shown: Black bean and lentil soup and a big cookie for dessert.

Snack

Celery with spicy homemade mayonnaise.

Liquid Intake

   Coffee:  40+ oz.   Water: 80+ oz. A glass of Pinot Noir

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Tuesday, July 29 Past imperfect

Post 1244, Day 210 of 2014
- 1,306 days since I started this blog -

Daily Comment

I worry sometimes when I think about my past. I know I remember some events differently than other people who were there (and I know I mis-remember who was there). Memory is funny like that. 

Of more concern than whether or not my memory is objectively accurate (who cares? It's my damn memory) is not remembering what I have and have not shared with people. There were memorable things that happened to me - especially in times where I was under great stress - that I haven't shared with my family and friends.

One of these involves an event that I deliberately didn't share with anyone, because I never really processed it myself, at least not in real time. 

In 2006, shortly after I had finished my Hepatitis C treatment (which lasted just short of a year), I began having severe problems with bladder control, and was diagnosed with BHP, and a TURP (Transurethral resection of the prostate) was ordered.

Standard practice called for an on-the-spot biopsy, which resulted in the news that, unusually, there was a malignancy in among those benign cancer cells. and a much greater amount (80+%) of my prostate was removed than was planned for.

The surgeon was "more than 90%" sure all the cancer had been removed, but advised a course of radiation and chemotherapy "to make certain". I refused. And told no one, at the time.

It was an on-the-spot decision. While I was encouraged to get a second opinion, and involve my wife in the decision-making process, I demurred. 

Having just had a miserable eleven-months with chemotherapy-like treatment that was advance-billed as "not too bad, sometimes like a cold," I was more than gun-shy, I was skeptical. 

My wife, a Physician Assistant, was very much a modern-medicine advocate, meaning, she was part of the Big Pharma-controlled medical system, and, in the frame of mind I was in (what do you mean I had cancer?) I didn't want someone with 'conventional' wisdom, and no sympathy for anyone who mistrusted the Medical Establishment), and I didn't know anybody outside that Establishment, either. 

I went with my gut. 'No mas,' thank you.

There has never been a hint of any cancer in me since, and I am vigilant. I think I made the right choice.

But I never fully processed the event, which began while I was under general anesthesia, and ended the next day, when I was home recovering. I thought that, I had shared it with Alex, some years later, but he doesn't remember that happening.

I went into the details of it last night, almost nine years after the fact, in a phone call with him, which resulted in today's Comment about mis-remembering the past.

He shared with me that during this time, he hadn't liked me. But around this time, I'd changed, and he'd flipped the switch on me: Perceiving a change in me, after years of disliking me, we started talking, and then, I was ok.

I remembered it differently. I'd been pretty consistent with him, all those years. In his Senior year in high school, he went through a radical change. Giving me the credit was wrong. I was pretty sure he mis-remembered, giving the credit for the change that brought us closer to me. But, to his credit, I think he has corrected his view.

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 Food and Diet Section

2014 Daily Weight

Today's Weight:          210.6 lbs

Previous Weight:         211.6 lbs

Day Net Loss/Gain:       - 1.0 lbs
       
Diet Comment

We'll see if I can continue this. I have doubts, so probably not.

Food Log 

Breakfast
Skipped.

Lunch

A cocoa-hemp-kale protein shake (almond-coconut milk, kefir, kale, large organic egg, whey powder (24g protein), hemp seeds, hemp protein (7g protein), raw organic cacao powder, chia gel, celery, moringa leaf powder, cinnamon and stevia-inulin blend.

Snack

Pepperoni.

Dinner

Burger with Chipotle Tabasco sauce, quinoa and lentils, cole slaw, guacamole.

Snack

Pepperoni, grilled cheese on Ezekiel 4:9 Flax bread and celery with spicy homemade mayonnaise.

Liquid Intake

   Coffee:  28+ oz.   Water: 100+ oz.

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Monday, July 28 50s misery tour

Post 1243, Day 209 of 2014
- 1,305 days since I started this blog -

Daily Comment

I had lost my most recent passport.

Needless to say, it turned up in the weekend's cleaning. It is expired now (it wasn't the last time I needed it, for my Security check when I started at the VA in December, 2010).

It dates from when I applied for a renewal in August, 2001. It's irrelevant to this comment, but I got Alex a passport, too. The plan was to go to England with the Drama Club that December. With normal processing, we received our passports in the beginning of November. The trip, however, was canceled due to post-9/11 panic.

Here's the thing, though. When I saw my passport photo, I had a wave of unpleasant memories roll over me. I could barely recognize the face in the photo.

I was very unhappy in my fifties. I was overweight (looking at that picture, I think I must have been about fifty pounds heavier than I am right now - maybe more). When you're that out of shape, you don't weigh yourself. I didn't even own a scale until I decided to do something about my weight, about three years later. I don't see any joy in my eyes.

The truth of the matter is, there wasn't a lot going right at this time of my life. My music was iffy, not always satisfying to me, I had lost my voice, was playing music I didn't love, with people I didn't like.

I was about to start my first attempt at a new  career as a Math teacher. This would nearly kill me within a year, and remains my greatest personal career failure. 

Alex was, at this point, antagonistic towards me. He didn't like me, hated being dependent on me, was probably resentful after the death of his mother. At fifteen years of age, he wanted to be just about anywhere I wasn't. He was embarrassed by me, unsympathetic towards me, and I was always around him - it was just the two of us, and there was no escape for him. I understood it then, I understand it now.

I ignored it as best I could. I continued doing what I had always done, which was to support him in all ways I could, while trying to let him figure things out for himself. 

The best thing I had going on then was the service I was providing for the Drama department of Alex's high school, on his behalf.

When I look at the picture, I see someone hurting, someone down, but determined to put his best face forward, even when that face can't seem to disguise the inner pain. Someone whose weak smile offers a glimmer of hope.

It would take more than a decade from the issuance of this passport for things to begin to mend, and they got worse before they got better. The next eight or so years after this picture was taken wouldn't see a lot of joy, and would see even what I thought at the time was my best shot at becoming whole end in crushing defeat.

By the end of my fifties, I would be just (barely) starting my recovery from being broke, homeless, jobless and even more depressed than at any time in the previous ten years. I would have survived a reversal that made the problems I had at the age of fifty-one seem small. But by my sixtieth birthday, the worst was past; that terrible decade of my life would pave the way for the best years of my adult life, beginning about half-way through my sixtieth year.

Funny how that works. Here's the passport picture that started this rumination:

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 Food and Diet Section

2014 Daily Weight

Today's Weight:          211.6 lbs

Previous Weight:         211.0 lbs

Day Net Loss/Gain:       + 0.6 lbs
       
Diet Comment

Last night's off-plan finish (what happens when I don't eat dinner until after a gig, and there aren't any good, quick choices when I'm really hungry). Plus, inadequate hydration.

Food Log 

Breakfast
A cocoa-hemp-kale protein shake (almond-coconut milk, kefir, kale, large organic egg, whey powder (24g protein), hemp seeds, hemp protein (7g protein), raw organic cacao powder, chia gel, moringa leaf powder, cinnamon and stevia-inulin blend.

Lunch

Roasted turkey breast and bacon with shaved parmesan cheese on baby kale, baby spinach and chard with balsamic vinaigrette.

Snack

Protein bar.

Dinner

Open omelet: organic eggs, cappicola, peppers, onions, parmesan cheese.

Snack

Pepperoni and cole slaw.

Liquid Intake

   Coffee:  28+ oz.   Water: 128+ oz.

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Sunday, July 27 Neater and cleaner

Post 1242, Day 208 of 2014
- 1,304 days since I started this blog -

Daily Comment

As I suspected I might, I got the apartment in much better shape.

I did it with a twenty-minutes on, forty-minutes off approach.

In this manner, and with ever-increasing breaks as the semblance of order started to encroach on what had looked like a dorm room two weeks after the finals-are-over party, I finished as much as I was going to get to Sunday afternoon.

I must admit, much better. Next weekend, the other one-and-a-half rooms of my three-and-a-half room apartment.

My reward for this unpleasantness: An afternoon gig and an early (well, earlier) bedtime.

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 Food and Diet Section

2014 Daily Weight

Today's Weight:           211.0 lbs

Previous Weight*:         212.2 lbs

Day Net Loss/Gain:        - 0.2 lbs
                 * Friday, July 25
         
Diet Comment

Although I didn't blog it, my weight was up a little Saturday, so I ate one on-plan meal (except for some Ezekiel sprouted grain bread as a base for toasted cheese) that day.

Food Log 

Breakfast
Skipped.

Lunch

Salmon salad (Wild Alaska pink salmon, mayonnaise) on baby kale, baby spinach, chard, and cole slaw mix.

Dinner

At Brae Loch Inn: Burger with bacon and fries, Caesar salad with chicken (no croutons). 

Snack

Protein bar.

Liquid Intake

   Coffee:  0+ oz.   Water: 48+ oz.

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Friday, July 25 The Cliff

Post 1241, Day 206 of 2014
- 1,302 days since I started this blog -

Daily Comment

I doubt there'll be any Daily Comments over the weekend. I might not even post anything at all.

I will be (drum roll, crowd gasp!) cleaning my apartment.

So scary. But the landlord is coming on Monday to verify I have all the cable connections she gets paid to allow. I also have some issues to discuss with her.

The apartment doesn't have to be clean, but it has to be a lot cleaner than it is.

Procrastination frequently ends in last-minute desperation. For me, this is it.

There's a big payoff for me if I get it done enough.

We'll see how far I get before I yield to sloth and not giving a fuck.  Or whether panic will see me through.

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 Food and Diet Section

2014 Daily Weight

Today's Weight:          212.2 lbs

Previous Weight:         212.4 lbs

Day Net Loss/Gain:       - 0.2 lbs

Diet Comment

Oh, dear. Everything was on-plan until dinner out last night. Oh, and the birthday drinks (two different bars, two different birthdays = two drinks). And, given that I was drinking, I got hungry, not thirsty, and ate too much late at night, and didn't drink enough water. So, no weight loss. Today was better!

Food Log 

Breakfast

Omelet with Parmesan cheese, sauteed peppers, onions, baby kale, baby spinach, chard and tomato-garlic oil. And bacon.

Lunch
Skipped.

Snack

Pepperoni and cole slaw.

Dinner

At White Water Pub: Fish and chips (with bun, tartar sauce and cole slaw), chocolate birthday cake. 

Snack

Protein bar.

Liquid Intake

   Coffee:  28+ oz.   Water: 110+ oz.

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Thursday, July 24 It's all timing and harmony

Post 1240, Day 205 of 2014
- 1,301 days since I started this blog -

Daily Comment

I listen to music like a musician. I am analytical, sometimes critical when I hear something that sounds off to me - but not judgmental, because often, when it sounds off it is because I am not hearing it right.

However, when I'm playing, it's all good until something goes wrong in the ensemble - a timing or melodic mistake. The flow is interrupted, I am jolted out of my no-think-just-play mindspace.

At that point, all energy goes to restoring the groove.

Tonight, I played with a drummer with a timing problem. He is a nice guy, very enthusiastic, and it was his gig, so I kept my thoughts (right away, you know there's a problem when I'm playing and thinking) to myself.

I did, however, invite him to return on Friday to hear the drummer (Jim Gass, if you care) in Bradshaw Blues. Jim and I lock, and it is the singer/guitarist in this trio who sometimes forgets where he is and what he is doing. Jim and I laugh - there is no situation we can't compensate for.

I had an interesting conversation about the situation with another bass player, whose sole playing involvement is in a reggae band. He said he 'hates' it when the drummer can't keep time. He wants the drummer to keep that together and let him float over it.

I just shook my head, and said, that makes your job easier, for sure, but to me, it's better when the responsibilities for the groove are approached by everybody. I'm well known for having a 'deep' pocket in my playing, but I am never happier than when everybody in the rhythm section feels it the same way. 

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 Food and Diet Section

2014 Daily Weight

Today's Weight:          212.4 lbs

Previous Weight:         209.4 lbs

Day Net Loss/Gain:       + 3.0 lbs

Diet Comment

I'm unhappy about this big weight gain. Due in part by the high-sodium lunch, the after-lunch cheat, the late evening 4th meal. I need to get serious now. I want to get that weight off. My playing schedule has been and continues to hamper my effort.

Food Log 

Breakfast

A cocoa-hemp-kale protein shake (almond-coconut milk, kale, large organic egg, whey powder (24g protein), hemp seeds, hemp protein (7g protein), raw organic cacao powder, chia gel, moringa leaf powder, cinnamon and stevia-inulin blend.

Lunch
Roasted turkey on Spring Mix greens, baby kale, cole slaw mix and creamy balsamic dressing. 

Dinner

At White Water Pub: 

Mixed salad with steak.

Snack

Pepperoni.

Liquid Intake

   Coffee:  28+ oz.   Water: 80+ oz.  and 2 shots of Jameson's.

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Wednesday, July 23

Post 1239, Day 204 of 2014
- 1,300 days since I started this blog -

Daily Comment

I heard bad news from friend and i am Fool band leader J. Brazill yesterday.

Health problems, both his and family members, and job problems. We had to cancel our one remaining Summer gig, and it fell to me to inform the club. I contacted and coordinated my band mates in Bradshaw Blues, who were standing by to play an opening set, if asked, to play in place of i am Fool. 

The club managers were very disappointed, but very sweet about it. They are fans of i am Fool, and were, with a few stipulations, agreeable about Bradshaw Blues stepping into the opening.

This has thrown me a little. I didn't process it much last night, being busy with logistical chores. Normally, at this point, I would go out and play at one of the open mics (there's a choice), but I wasn't feeling it.

It made for an unhappy evening. Today, all I could do was make sure J. knew I would help in any way I could. 

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 Food and Diet Section

2014 Daily Weight

Today's Weight:          209.4 lbs

Previous Weight:         211.2 lbs

Day Net Loss/Gain:       - 1.8 lbs

Diet Comment

A nice little loss, that will be undone by the day's eating.

Food Log 

Breakfast

Skipped.

Lunch
At Ling-Ling's Chinese Buffet and Grill:

Brussels sprouts, kimchee, and, from the "Mongolian Grill", my go-to dish: pork and chicken with cabbage, onions, mushrooms, green peppers and broccoli.

Snack
Medium-size soft-serve ice cream in a cup.

Dinner

Sauteed chicken and mixed salad, prepared by Chad before rehearsal. 

Snack

Pepperoni and cole slaw, and a protein bar for dessert.

Liquid Intake

   Coffee:  8+ oz.   Water: 80+ oz.

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